“Do you like my dad?” Yannis asked.
The question was innocent. Pure. Unfiltered curiosity, the kind only children possess before the world teaches them better.
The air in the car turned to glass.
Elena froze.
I saw it in the mirror—the way her shoulders locked, the way her breath caught like she’d been struck. Her mouth opened, then closed. No sound came out.
Instead, her free hand lifted.
Her fingers moved—quick, fluid, precise. Sign language. Not hesitant. Not learned from a book. Natural. Fluent.
Yannis’s face lit up like dawn breaking.
He signed back immediately, hands flying, expression animated, alive. The conversation flowed between them like water over stone—effortless, intimate, excluding everyone else in the car.
Including me.
I gripped the edge of the seat, nails biting into the leather.
I had tried.
God, I had tried.
After Yannis’s mutism began, I bought books on sign language. Watched hours of instructional videos. Hired tutors who spoke softly, who praised every small attempt as if encouragement alone could mend what had been shattered.
But grief had already hollowed me out, and rage had taken residence where patience should have lived. Every lesson collapsed into frustration. My hands felt clumsy—stupid—refusing to obey me. The signs slid through my mind like smoke I couldn’t grasp.
I caught maybe one word in ten.
Enough to know they were talking about me.
Enough to know they were shutting me out.
Enough to know she had reached my son in hours where I had failed for years.
Petros glanced sideways at me, eyes sharp, waiting for an order. Waiting for permission to intervene, to end this exchange before it dug any deeper.
I said nothing.
The Ferrari devoured the coastal highway, engine growling low and restrained, a predator forced to heel.
Palm trees blurred past in streaks of green and shadow.
To our left, the ocean stretched endless and glittering—beautiful, indifferent, uncaring of kings and blood and vows made under duress.
In the mirror, Elena looked pale, bloodied, exhausted.
But her eyes never left Yannis.
When he signed something that made him giggle—a soft, breathy sound that punched straight through my chest—she smiled.
Not wide. Not triumphant.
Small. Broken. Real.
The sound echoed in my skull, unwanted and unbearable. I hadn’t heard that laugh since before Maria’s funeral, since before the world had gone quiet and sharp and cruel.
